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The Theory of the Leisure Class:
An Economic Study of Institutions

Chapter 10: Modern Survivals of Prowess

Thorstein Veblen

The leisure class lives by the industrial community rather than in it. Its
relations to industry are of a pecuniary rather than an industrial kind.
Admission to the class is gained by exercise of the pecuniary aptitudes --
aptitudes for acquisition rather than for serviceability. There is, therefore, a
continued selective sifting of the human material that makes up the leisure
class, and this selection proceeds on the ground of fitness for pecuniary
pursuits. But the scheme of life of the class is in large part a heritage from
the past, and embodies much of the habits and ideals of the earlier barbarian
period. This archaic, barbarian scheme of life imposes itself also on the lower
orders, with more or less mitigation. In its turn the scheme of life, of
conventions, acts selectively and by education to shape the human material, and
its action runs chiefly in the direction of conserving traits, habits, and
ideals that belong to the early barbarian age -- the age of prowess and
predatory life.

The most immediate and unequivocal expression of that archaic human nature
which characterizes man in the predatory stage is the fighting propensity
proper. In cases where the predatory activity is a collective one,

(247) this propensity is frequently called the martial spirit, or, latterly,
patriotism. It needs no insistence to find assent to the proposition that in the
countries of civilized Europe the hereditary leisure class is endowed with this
martial spirit in a higher degree than the middle classes. Indeed, the leisure
class claims the distinction as a matter of pride, and no doubt with some
grounds. War is honorable, and warlike prowess is eminently honorific in the
eyes of the generality of men; and this admiration of warlike prowess is itself
the best voucher of a predatory temperament in the admirer of war. The
enthusiasm for war, and the predatory temper of which it is the index, prevail
in the largest measure among the upper classes, especially among the hereditary
leisure class. Moreover, the ostensible serious occupation of the upper class is
that of government, which, in point of origin and developmental content, is also
a predatory occupation.

The only class which could at all dispute with the hereditary leisure class
the honor of an habitual bellicose frame of mind is that of the lower-class
delinquents. In ordinary times, the large body of the industrial classes is
relatively apathetic touching warlike interests. When unexcited, this body of
the common people, which makes up the effective force of the industrial
community, is rather averse to any other than a defensive fight; indeed, it
responds a little tardily even to a provocation which makes for an attitude of
defense. In the more civilized communities, or rather in the communities which
have reached an advanced industrial development, the spirit of warlike
aggression may be said to be

(248) obsolescent among the common people. This does not say that there is
not an appreciable number of individuals among the industrial classes in whom
the martial spirit asserts itself obtrusively. Nor does it say that the body of
the people may not be fired with martial ardor for a time under the stimulus of
some special provocation, such as is seen in operation today in more than one of
the countries of Europe, and for the time in America. But except for such
seasons of temporary exaltation, and except for those individuals who are
endowed with an archaic temperament of the predatory type, together with the
similarly endowed body of individuals among the higher and the lowest classes,
the inertness of the mass of any modern civilized community in this respect is
probably so great as would make war impracticable, except against actual
invasion. The habits and aptitudes of the common run of men make for an
unfolding of activity in other, less picturesque directions than that of war.

This class difference in temperament may be due in part to a difference in
the inheritance of acquired traits in the several classes, but it seems also, in
some measure, to correspond with a difference in ethnic derivation. The class
difference is in this respect visibly less in those countries whose population
is relatively homogeneous, ethnically, than in the countries where there is a
broader divergence between the ethnic elements that make up the several classes
of the community. In the same connection it may be noted that the later
accessions to the leisure class in the latter countries, in a general way, show
less of the martial spirit than con-

(249) temporary representatives of the aristocracy of the ancient line. These
nouveaux arrivés have recently emerged from the commonplace body of the
population and owe their emergence into the leisure class to the exercise of
traits and propensities which are not to be classed as prowess in the ancient
sense.

Apart from warlike activity proper, the institution of the duel is also an
expression of the same superior readiness for combat; and the duel is a
leisure-class institution. The duel is in substance a more or less deliberate
resort to a fight as a final settlement of a difference of opinion. In civilized
communities it prevails as a normal phenomenon only where there is an hereditary
leisure class, and almost exclusively among that class. The exceptions are (1)
military and naval officers who are ordinarily members of the leisure class, and
who are at the same time specially trained to predatory habits of mind and (2)
the lower-class delinquents -- who are by inheritance, or training, or both, of
a similarly predatory disposition and habit. It is only the high-bred gentleman
and the rowdy that normally resort to blows as the universal solvent of
differences of opinion. The plain man will ordinarily fight only when excessive
momentary irritation or alcoholic exaltation act to inhibit the more complex
habits of response to the stimuli that make for provocation. He is then thrown
back upon the simpler, less differentiated forms of the instinct of
self-assertion; that is to say, he reverts temporarily and without reflection to
an archaic habit of mind.

This institution of the duel as a mode of finally

(250) settling disputes and serious questions of precedence shades off into
the obligatory, unprovoked private fight, as a social obligation due to one's
good repute. As a leisure-class usage of this kind we have, particularly, that
bizarre survival of bellicose chivalry, the German student duel. In the lower or
spurious leisure class of the delinquents there is in all countries a similar,
though less formal, social obligation incumbent on the rowdy to assert his
manhood in unprovoked combat with his fellows. And spreading through all grades
of society, a similar usage prevails among the boys of the community. The boy
usually knows to nicety, from day to day, how he and his associates grade in
respect of relative fighting capacity; and in the community of boys there is
ordinarily no secure basis of reputability for any one who, by exception, will
not or can not fight on invitation.

All this applies especially to boys above a certain somewhat vague limit of
maturity. The child's temperament does not commonly answer to this description
during infancy and the years of close tutelage, when the child still habitually
seeks contact with its mother at every turn of its daily life. During this
earlier period there is little aggression and little propensity for antagonism.
The transition from this peaceable temper to the predaceous, and in extreme
cases malignant, mischievousness of the boy is a gradual one, and it is
accomplished with more completeness, covering a larger range of the individual's
aptitudes, in some cases than in others. In the earlier stage of his growth, the
child, whether boy or girl, shows less of initiative and aggres-

(251) -sive self-assertion and less of an inclination to isolate himself and
his interests from the domestic group in which he lives, and he shows more of
sensitiveness to rebuke, bashfulness, timidity, and the need of friendly human
contact. In the common run of cases this early temperament passes, by a gradual
but somewhat rapid obsolescence of the infantile features, into the temperament
of the boy proper; though there are also cases where the predaceous futures of
boy life do not emerge at all, or at the most emerge in but a slight and obscure
degree.

In girls the transition to the predaceous stage is seldom accomplished with
the same degree of completeness as in boys; and in a relatively large proportion
of cases it is scarcely undergone at all. In such cases the transition from
infancy to adolescence and maturity is a gradual and unbroken process of the
shifting of interest from infantile purposes and aptitudes to the purposes,
functions, and relations of adult life. In the girls there is a less general
prevalence of a predaceous interval in the development; and in the cases where
it occurs, the predaceous and isolating attitude during the interval is commonly
less accentuated.

In the male child the predaceous interval is ordinarily fairly well marked
and lasts for some time, but it is commonly terminated (if at all) with the
attainment of maturity. This last statement may need very material
qualification. The cases are by no means rare in which the transition from the
boyish to the adult temperament is not made, or is made only partially --
understanding by the "adult" temperament the average temperament

(252) of those adult individuals in modern industrial life who have
some serviceability for the purposes of the collective life process, and who may
therefore be said to make up the effective average of the industrial community.

The ethnic composition of the European populations varies. In some cases even
the lower classes are in large measure made up of the peace-disturbing dolicho-blond;
while in others this ethnic element is found chiefly among the hereditary
leisure class. The fighting habit seems to prevail to a less extent among the
working-class boys in the latter class of populations than among the boys of the
upper classes or among those of the populations first named.

If this generalization as to the temperament of the boy among the working
classes should be found true on a fuller and closer scrutiny of the field, it
would add force to the view that the bellicose temperament is in some
appreciable degree a race characteristic; it appears to enter more largely into
the make-up of the dominant, upper-class ethnic type -- the dolicho-blond -- of
the European countries than into the subservient, lower-class types of man which
are conceived to constitute the body of the population of the same communities.

The case of the boy may seem not to bear seriously on the question of the
relative endowment of prowess with which the several classes of society are
gifted; but it is at least of some value as going to show that this fighting
impulse belongs to a more archaic temperament than that possessed by the average
adult man of the industrious classes. In this, as in many other features of
child life, the child reproduces, temporarily

(253) and in miniature, some of the earlier phases of the development
of adult man. Under this interpretation, the boy's predilection for exploit and
for isolation of his own interest is to be taken as a transient reversion to the
human nature that is normal to the early barbarian culture -- the predatory
culture proper. In this respect, as in much else, the leisure-class and the
delinquent-class character shows a persistence into adult life of traits that
are normal to childhood and youth, and that are likewise normal or habitual to
the earlier stages of culture. Unless the difference is traceable entirely to a
fundamental difference between persistent ethnic types, the traits that
distinguish the swaggering delinquent and the punctilious gentleman of leisure
from the common crowd are, in some measure, marks of an arrested spiritual
development. They mark an immature phase, as compared with the stage of
development attained by the average of the adults in the modern industrial
community. And it will appear presently that the puerile spiritual make-up of
these representatives of the upper and the lowest social strata shows itself
also in the presence of other archaic traits than this proclivity to ferocious
exploit and isolation.

As if to leave no doubt about the essential immaturity of the fighting
temperament, we have, bridging the interval between legitimate boyhood and adult
manhood, the aimless and playful, but more or less systematic and elaborate,
disturbances of the peace in vogue among schoolboys of a slightly higher age. In
the common run of cases, these disturbances are confined to the period of
adolescence. They recur with decreasing

(254) frequency and acuteness as youth merges into adult life, and so they
reproduce, in a general way, in the life of the individual, the sequence by
which the group has passed from the predatory to a more settled habit of life.
In an appreciable number of cases the spiritual growth of the individual comes
to a close before he emerges from this puerile phase; in these cases the
fighting temper persists through life. Those individuals who in spiritual
development eventually reach man's estate, therefore, ordinarily pass through a
temporary archaic phase corresponding to the permanent spiritual level of the
fighting and sporting men. Different individuals will, of course, achieve
spiritual maturity and sobriety in this respect in different degrees; and those
who fail of the average remain as an undissolved residue of crude humanity in
the modern industrial community and as a foil for that selective process of
adaptation which makes for a heightened industrial efficiency and the fullness
of life of the collectivity.

This arrested spiritual development may express itself not only in a direct
participation by adults in youthful exploits of ferocity, but also indirectly in
aiding and abetting disturbances of this kind on the part of younger persons. It
thereby furthers the formation of habits of ferocity which may persist in the
later life of the growing generation, and so retard any movement in the
direction of a more peaceable effective temperament on the part of the
community. If a person so endowed with a proclivity for exploits is in a
position to guide the development of habits in the adolescent members of the
community, the influence which he

(255) exerts in the direction of conservation and reversion to prowess may be
very considerable. This is the significance, for instance, of the fostering care
latterly bestowed by many clergymen and other pillars of society upon
"boys' brigades" and similar pseudo-military organizations. The same
is true of the encouragement given to the growth of "college spirit,"
college athletics, and the like, in the higher institutions of learning.

These manifestations of the predatory temperament are all to be classed under
the head of exploit. They are partly simple and unreflected expressions of an
attitude of emulative ferocity, partly activities deliberately entered upon with
a view to gaining repute for prowess. Sports of all kinds are of the same
general character, including prize-fights, bull-fights, athletics, shooting,
angling, yachting, and games of skill, even where the element of destructive
physical efficiency is not an obtrusive feature. Sports shade off from the basis
of hostile combat, through skill, to cunning and chicanery, without its being
possible to draw a line at any point. The ground of an addiction to sports is an
archaic spiritual constitution -- the possession of the predatory emulative
propensity in a relatively high potency, A strong proclivity to adventuresome
exploit and to the infliction of damage is especially pronounced in those
employments which are in colloquial usage specifically called sportsmanship.

It is perhaps truer, or at least more evident, as regards sports than as
regards the other expressions of predatory emulation already spoken of, that the
temperament which inclines men to them is essentially

(256) a boyish temperament. The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar
degree marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature. This peculiar
boyishness of temperament in sporting men immediately becomes apparent when
attention is directed to the large element of make-believe that is present in
all sporting activity. Sports share this character of make-believe with the
games and exploits to which children, especially boys, are habitually inclined.
Make-believe does not enter in the same proportion into all sports, but it is
present in a very appreciable degree in all. It is apparently present in a
larger measure in sportsmanship proper and in athletic contests than in set
games of skill of a more sedentary character; although this rule may not be
found to apply with any great uniformity. It is noticeable, for instance, that
even very mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are apt to
carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress upon their own
imagination the seriousness of their undertaking. These huntsmen are also prone
to a histrionic, prancing gait and to an elaborate exaggeration of the motions,
whether of stealth or of onslaught, involved in their deeds of exploit.
Similarly in athletic sports there is almost invariably present a good share of
rant and swagger and ostensible mystification -- features which mark the
histrionic nature of these employments. In all this, of course, the reminder of
boyish make-believe is plain enough. The slang of athletics, by the way, is in
great part made up of extremely sanguinary locutions borrowed from the
terminology of warfare. Ex-

(257) -cept where it is adopted as a necessary means of secret communication,
the use of a special slang in any employment is probably to be accepted as
evidence that the occupation in question is substantially make-believe.

A further feature in which sports differ from the duel and similar
disturbances of the peace is the peculiarity that they admit of other motives
being assigned for them besides the impulses of exploit and ferocity. There is
probably little if any other motive present in any given case, but the fact that
other reasons for indulging in sports are frequently assigned goes to say that
other grounds are sometimes present in a subsidiary way. Sportsmen -- hunters
and anglers -- are more or less in the habit of assigning a love of nature, the
need of recreation, and the like, as the incentives to their favorite pastime.
These motives are no doubt frequently present and make up a part of the
attractiveness of the sportsman's life; but these can not be the chief
incentives. These ostensible needs could be more readily and fully satisfied
without the accompaniment of a systematic effort to take the life of those
creatures that make up an essential feature of that "nature" that is
beloved by the sportsman. It is, indeed, the most noticeable effect of the
sportsman's activity to keep nature in a state of chronic desolation by killing
off all living thing whose destruction he can compass.

Still, there is ground for the sportsman's claim that under the existing
conventionalities his need of recreation and of contact with nature can best be
satisfied by the course which he takes. Certain canons of good

(258) breeding have been imposed by the prescriptive example of a predatory
leisure class in the past and have been somewhat painstakingly conserved by the
usage of the latter-day representatives of that class; and these canons will not
permit him, without blame, to seek contact with nature on other terms. From
being an honorable employment handed down from the predatory culture as the
highest form of everyday leisure, sports have come to be the only form of
outdoor activity that has the full sanction of decorum. Among the proximate
incentives to shooting and angling, then, may be the need of recreation and
outdoor life. The remoter cause which imposes the necessity of seeking these
objects under the cover of systematic slaughter is a prescription that can not
be violated except at the risk of disrepute and consequent lesion to one's
self-respect.

The case of other kinds of sport is somewhat similar. Of these, athletic
games are the best example. Prescriptive usage with respect to what forms of
activity, exercise, and recreation are permissible under the code of reputable
living is of course present here also. Those who are addicted to athletic
sports, or who admire them, set up the claim that these afford the best
available means of recreation and of "physical culture." And
prescriptive usage gives countenance to the claim. The canons of reputable
living exclude from the scheme of life of the leisure class all activity that
can not be classed as conspicuous leisure. And consequently they tend by
prescription to exclude it also from the scheme of life of the community gen-

(259) -erally. At the same time purposeless physical exertion is tedious and
distasteful beyond tolerance. As has been noticed in another connection,
recourse is in such a case had to some form of activity which shall at least
afford a colorable pretense of purpose, even if the object assigned be only a
make-believe. Sports satisfy these requirements of substantial futility together
with a colorable make-believe of purpose. In addition to this they afford scope
for emulation, and are attractive also on that account. In order to be decorous,
an employment must conform to the leisure-class canon of reputable waste; at the
same time all activity, in order to be persisted in as an habitual, even if only
partial, expression of life, must conform to the generically human canon of
efficiency for some serviceable objective end. The leisure-class canon demands
strict and comprehensive futility, the instinct of workmanship demands
purposeful action. The leisure-class canon of decorum acts slowly and
pervasively, by a selective elimination of all substantially useful or
purposeful modes of action from the accredited scheme of life; the instinct of
workmanship acts impulsively and may be satisfied, provisionally, with a
proximate purpose. It is only as the apprehended ulterior futility of a given
line of action enters the reflective complex of consciousness as an element
essentially alien to the normally purposeful trend of the life process that its
disquieting and deterrent effect on the consciousness of the agent is wrought.

The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend of
which is necessarily in the direc-

(260) -tion of serviceability to the life process. When it is attempted to
assimilate systematic waste or futility, as an end in life, into this organic
complex, there presently supervenes a revulsion. But this revulsion of the
organism may be avoided if the attention can be confined to the proximate,
unreflected purpose of dexterous or emulative exertion. Sports -- hunting,
angling, athletic games, and the like -- afford an exercise for dexterity and
for the emulative ferocity and astuteness characteristic of predatory life. So
long as the individual is but slightly gifted with reflection or with a sense of
the ulterior trend of his actions so long as his life is substantially a life of
naive impulsive action -- so long the immediate and unreflected purposefulness
of sports, in the way of an expression of dominance, will measurably satisfy his
instinct of workmanship. This is especially true if his dominant impulses are
the unreflecting emulative propensities of the predaceous temperament. At the
same time the canons of decorum will commend sports to him as expressions of a
pecuniarily blameless life. It is by meeting these two requirements, of ulterior
wastefulness and proximate purposefulness, that any given employment holds its
place as a traditional and habitual mode of decorous recreation. In the sense
that other forms of recreation and exercise are morally impossible to persons of
good breeding and delicate sensibilities, then, sports are the best available
means of recreation under existing circumstances.

But those members of respectable society who advocate athletic games commonly
justify their attitude on

(261) this head to themselves and to their neighbors on the ground that these
games serve as an invaluable means of development. They not only improve the
contestant's physique, but it is commonly added that they also foster a manly
spirit, both in the participants and in the spectators. Football is the
particular game which will probably first occur to any one in this community
when the question of the serviceability of athletic games is raised, as this
form of athletic contest is at present uppermost in the mind of those who plead
for or against games as a means of physical or moral salvation. This typical
athletic sport may, therefore, serve to illustrate the bearing of athletics upon
the development of the contestant's character and physique. It has been said,
not inaptly, that the relation of football to physical culture is much the same
as that of the bull-fight to agriculture. Serviceability for these lusory
institutions requires sedulous training or breeding. The material used, whether
brute or human, is subjected to careful selection and discipline, in order to
secure and accentuate certain aptitudes and propensities which are
characteristic of the ferine state, and which tend to obsolescence under
domestication. This does not mean that the result in either case is an all
around and consistent rehabilitation of the ferine or barbarian habit of mind
and body. The result is rather a one-sided return to barbarism or to the feroe
natura -- a rehabilitation and accentuation of those ferine traits which
make for damage and desolation, without a corresponding development of the
traits which would serve the individual's self-preservation and fullness of life
in a ferine environment. The culture

(262) bestowed in football gives a product of exotic ferocity and cunning. It
is a rehabilitation of the early barbarian temperament, together with a
suppression of those details of temperament, which, as seen from the standpoint
of the social and economic exigencies, are the redeeming features of the savage
character.

The physical vigor acquired in the training for athletic games -- so far as
the training may be said to have this effect -- is of advantage both to the
individual and to the collectivity, in that, other things being equal, it
conduces to economic serviceability. The spiritual traits which go with athletic
sports are likewise economically advantageous to the individual, as
contradistinguished from the interests of the collectivity. This holds true in
any community where these traits are present in some degree in the population.
Modern competition is in large part a process of self-assertion on the basis of
these traits of predatory human nature. In the sophisticated form in which they
enter into the modern, peaceable emulation, the possession of these traits in
some measure is almost a necessary of life to the civilized man. But while they
are indispensable to the competitive individual, they are not directly
serviceable to the community. So far as regards the serviceability of the
individual for the purposes of the collective life, emulative efficiency is of
use only indirectly if at all. Ferocity and cunning are of no use to the
community except in its hostile dealings with other communities; and they are
useful to the individual only because there is so large a proportion of the same
traits actively present in the human environment to which he is exposed.

(263) Any individual who enters the competitive struggle without the due
endowment of these traits is at a disadvantage, somewhat as a hornless steer
would find himself at a disadvantage in a drove of horned cattle.

The possession and the cultivation of the predatory traits of character may,
of course, be desirable on other than economic grounds. There is a prevalent
aesthetic or ethical predilection for the barbarian aptitudes, and the traits in
question minister so effectively to this predilection that their serviceability
in the aesthetic or ethical respect probably offsets any economic
unserviceability which they may give. But for the present purpose that is beside
the point. Therefore nothing is said here as to the desirability or advisability
of sports on the whole, or as to their value on other than economic grounds.

In popular apprehension there is much that is admirable in the type of
manhood which the life of sport fosters. There is self-reliance and
good-fellowship, so termed in the somewhat loose colloquial use of the words.
From a different point of view the qualities currently so characterized might be
described as truculence and clannishness. The reason for the current approval
and admiration of these manly qualities, as well as for their being called
manly, is the same as the reason for their usefulness to the individual. The
members of the community, and especially that class of the community which sets
the pace in canons of taste, are endowed with this range of propensities in
sufficient measure to make their absence in others felt as a shortcoming, and to
make their possession in an exceptional

(264) degree appreciated as an attribute of superior merit. The traits of
predatory man are by no means obsolete in the common run of modern populations.
They are present and can be called out in bold relief at any time by any appeal
to the sentiments in which they express themselves -- unless this appeal should
clash with the specific activities that make up our habitual occupations and
comprise the general range of our everyday interests. The common run of the
population of any industrial community is emancipated from these, economically
considered, untoward propensities only in the sense that, through partial and
temporary disuse, they have lapsed into the background of sub-conscious motives.
With varying degrees of potency in different individuals, they remain available
for the aggressive shaping of men's actions and sentiments whenever a stimulus
of more than everyday intensity comes in to call them forth. And they assert
themselves forcibly in any case where no occupation alien to the predatory
culture has usurped the individual's everyday range of interest and sentiment.
This is the case among the leisure class and among certain portions of the
population which are ancillary to that class. Hence the facility with which any
new accessions to the leisure class take to sports; and hence the rapid growth
of sports and of the sporting sentient in any industrial community where wealth
has accumulated sufficiently to exempt a considerable part of the population
from work.

A homely and familiar fact may serve to show that the predaceous impulse does
not prevail in the same degree in all classes. Taken simply as a feature of

(265) modern life, the habit of carrying a walking-stick may seem at best a
trivial detail; but the usage has a significance for the point in question. The
classes among whom the habit most prevails -- the classes with whom the
walking-stick is associated in popular apprehension -- are the men of the
leisure class proper, sporting men, and the lower-class delinquents. To these
might perhaps be added the men engaged in the pecuniary employments. The same is
not true of the common run of men engaged in industry and it may be noted by the
way that women do not carry a stick except in case of infirmity, where it has a
use of a different kind. The practice is of course in great measure a matter of
polite usage; but the basis of polite usage is, in turn, the proclivities of the
class which sets the pace in polite usage. The walking-stick serves the purpose
of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in
useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure. But it is
also a weapon, and it meets a felt need of barbarian man on that ground. The
handling of so tangible and primitive a means of offense is very comforting to
any one who is gifted with even a moderate share of ferocity.

The exigencies of the language make it impossible to avoid an apparent
implication of disapproval of the aptitudes, propensities, and expressions of
life here under discussion. It is, however, not intended to imply anything in
the way of deprecation or commendation of any one of these phases of human
character or of the life process. The various elements of the prevalent human
nature are taken up from the point of view of

(266) economic theory, and the traits discussed are gauged and graded with
regard to their immediate economic bearing on the facility of the collective
life process. That is to say, these phenomena are here apprehended from the
economic point of view and are valued with respect to their direct action in
furtherance or hindrance of a more perfect adjustment of the human collectivity
to the environment and to the institutional structure required by the economic
situation of the collectivity for the present and for the immediate future. For
these purposes the traits handed down from the predatory culture are less
serviceable than might be. Although even in this connection it is not to be
overlooked that the energetic aggressiveness and pertinacity of predatory man is
a heritage of no mean value. The economic value -- with some regard also to the
social value in the narrower sense -- of these aptitudes and propensities is
attempted to be passed upon without reflecting on their value as seen from
another point of view. When contrasted with the prosy mediocrity of the
latter-day industrial scheme of life, and judged by the accredited standards of
morality, and more especially by the standards of aesthetics and of poetry,
these survivals from a more primitive type of manhood may have a very different
value from that here assigned them. But all this being foreign to the purpose in
hand, no expression of opinion on this latter head would be in place here. All
that is admissible is to enter the caution that these standards of excellence,
which are alien to the present purpose, must not be allowed to influence our
economic appreciation of these traits of

(267) human character or of the activities which foster their growth. This
applies both as regards those persons who actively participate in sports and
those whose sporting experience consists in contemplation only. What is here
said of the sporting propensity is likewise pertinent to sundry reflections
presently to be made in this connection on what would colloquially be known as
the religious life.

The last paragraph incidentally touches upon the fact that everyday speech
can scarcely be employed in discussing this class of aptitudes and activities
without implying deprecation or apology. The fact is significant as showing the
habitual attitude of the dispassionate common man toward the propensities which
express themselves in sports and in exploit generally. And this is perhaps as
convenient a place as any to discuss that undertone of deprecation which runs
through all the voluminous discourse in defense or in laudation of athletic
sports, as well as of other activities of a predominantly predatory character.
The same apologetic frame of mind is at least beginning to be observable in the
spokesmen of most other institutions handed down from the barbarian phase of
life. Among these archaic institutions which are felt to need apology are
comprised, with others, the entire existing system of the distribution of
wealth, together with the resulting class distinction of status; all or nearly
all forms of consumption that come under the head of conspicuous waste; the
status of women under the patriarchal system; and many features of the
traditional creeds and devout observances, especially the exoteric expressions
of the

(268) creed and the naive apprehension of received observances. What is to be
said in this connection of the apologetic attitude taken in commending sports
and the sporting character will therefore apply, with a suitable change in
phraseology, to the apologies offered in behalf of these other, related elements
of our social heritage.

There is a feeling -- usually vague and not commonly avowed in so many words
by the apologist himself, but ordinarily perceptible in the manner of his
discourse -- that these sports, as well as the general range of predaceous
impulses and habits of thought which underlie the sporting character, do not
altogether commend themselves to common sense. "As to the majority of
murderers, they are very incorrect characters." This aphorism offers a
valuation of the predaceous temperament, and of the disciplinary effects of its
overt expression and exercise, as seen from the moralist's point of view. As
such it affords an indication of what is the deliverance of the sober sense of
mature men as to the degree of availability of the predatory habit of mind for
the purposes of the collective life. It is felt that the presumption is against
any activity which involves habituation to the predatory attitude, and that the
burden of proof lies with those who speak for the rehabilitation of the
predaceous temper and for the practices which strengthen it. There is a strong
body of popular sentiment in favor of diversions and enterprises of the kind in
question; but there is at the same time present in the community a pervading
sense that this ground of sentiment wants legitimation. The required legitima-

(269) -tion is ordinarily sought by showing that although sports are
substantially of a predatory, socially disintegrating effect; although their
proximate effect runs in the direction of reversion to propensities that are
industrially disserviceable; yet indirectly and remotely -- by some not readily
comprehensible process of polar induction, or counter-irritation perhaps --
sports are conceived to foster a habit of mind that is serviceable for the
social or industrial purpose. That is to say, although sports are essentially of
the nature of invidious exploit, it is presumed that by some remote and obscure
effect they result in the growth of a temperament conducive to non-invidious
work. It is commonly attempted to show all this empirically or it is rather
assumed that this is the empirical generalization which must be obvious to any
one who cares to see it. In conducting the proof of this thesis the treacherous
ground of inference from cause to effect is somewhat shrewdly avoided, except so
far as to show that the "manly virtues" spoken of above are fostered
by sports. But since it is these manly virtues that are (economically) in need
of legitimation, the chain of proof breaks off where it should begin. In the
most general economic terms, these apologies are an effort to show that, in
spite of the logic of the thing, sports do in fact further what may broadly be
called workmanship. So long as he has not succeeded in persuading himself or
others that this is their effect the thoughtful apologist for sports will not
rest content, and commonly, it is to be admitted, he does not rest content. His
discontent with his own vindication of the practice in question is ordinarily
shown by his

(270) truculent tone and by the eagerness with which he heaps up
asseverations in support of his position.

But why are apologies needed? If there prevails a body of popular sentient in
favor of sports, why is not that fact a sufficient legitimation? The protracted
discipline of prowess to which the race has been subjected under the predatory
and quasi-peaceable culture has transmitted to the men of today a temperament
that finds gratification in these expressions of ferocity and cunning. So, why
not accept these sports as legitimate expressions of a normal and wholesome
human nature? What other norm is there that is to be lived up to than that given
in the aggregate range of propensities that express themselves in the sentiments
of this generation, including the hereditary strain of prowess? The ulterior
norm to which appeal is taken is the instinct of workmanship, which is an
instinct more fundamental, of more ancient prescription, than the propensity to
predatory emulation. The latter is but a special development of the instinct of
workmanship, a variant, relatively late and ephemeral in spite of its great
absolute antiquity. The emulative predatory impulse -- or the instinct of
sportsmanship, as it might well be called -- is essentially unstable in
comparison with the primordial instinct of workmanship out of which it has been
developed and differentiated. Tested by this ulterior norm of life, predatory
emulation, and therefore the life of sports, falls short.

The manner and the measure in which the institution of a leisure class
conduces to the conservation of sports and invidious exploit can of course not
be succinctly

(271) stated. From the evidence already recited it appears that, in sentient
and inclinations, the leisure class is more favorable to a warlike attitude and
animus than the industrial classes. Something similar seems to be true as
regards sports. But it is chiefly in its indirect effects, though the canons of
decorous living, that the institution has its influence on the prevalent
sentiment with respect to the sporting life. This indirect effect goes almost
unequivocally in the direction of furthering a survival of the predatory
temperament and habits; and this is true even with respect to those variants of
the sporting life which the higher leisure-class code of proprieties proscribes;
as, e.g., prize-fighting, cock-fighting, and other like vulgar expressions of
the sporting temper. Whatever the latest authenticated schedule of detail
proprieties may say, the accredited canons of decency sanctioned by the
institution say without equivocation that emulation and waste are good and their
opposites are disreputable. In the crepuscular light of the social nether spaces
the details of the code are not apprehended with all the facility that might be
desired, and these broad underlying canons of decency are therefore applied
somewhat unreflectingly, with little question as to the scope of their
competence or the exceptions that have been sanctioned in detail.

Addiction to athletic sports, not only in the way of direct participation,
but also in the way of sentiment and moral support, is, in a more or less
pronounced degree, a characteristic of the leisure class; and it is a trait
which that class shares with the lower-class delinquents, and with such
atavistic elements through-

(272) -out the body of the community as are endowed with a dominant
predaceous trend. Few individuals among the populations of Western civilized
countries are so far devoid of the predaceous instinct as to find no diversion
in contemplating athletic sports and games, but with the common run of
individuals among the industrial classes the inclination to sports does not
assert itself to the extent of constituting what may fairly be called a sporting
habit. With these classes sports are an occasional diversion rather than a
serious feature of life. This common body of the people can therefore not be
said to cultivate the sporting propensity. Although it is not obsolete in the
average of them, or even in any appreciable number of individuals, yet the
predilection for sports in the commonplace industrial classes is of the nature
of a reminiscence, more or less diverting as an occasional interest, rather than
a vital and permanent interest that counts as a dominant factor in shaping the
organic complex of habits of thought into which it enters.

As it manifests itself in the sporting life of today, this propensity may not
appear to be an economic factor of grave consequence. Taken simply by itself it
does not count for a great deal in its direct effects on the industrial
efficiency or the consumption of any given individual; but the prevalence and
the growth of the type of human nature of which this propensity is a
characteristic feature is a matter of some consequence. It affects the economic
life of the collectivity both as regards the rate of economic development and as
regards the character of the results attained by the develop-

(273) -ment. For better or worse, the fact that the popular habits of thought
are in any degree dominated by this type of character can not but greatly affect
the scope, direction, standards, and ideals of the collective economic life, as
well as the degree of adjustment of the collective life to the environment.

Something to a like effect is to be said of other traits that go to make up
the barbarian character. For the purposes of economic theory, these further
barbarian traits may be taken as concomitant variations of that predaceous
temper of which prowess is an expression. In great measure they are not
primarily of an economic character, nor do they have much direct economic
bearing. They serve to indicate the stage of economic evolution to which the
individual possessed of them is adapted. They are of importance, therefore, as
extraneous tests of the degree of adaptation of the character in which they are
comprised to the economic exigencies of today, but they are also to some extent
important as being aptitudes which themselves go to increase or diminish the
economic serviceability of the individual.

As it finds expression in the life of the barbarian, prowess manifests itself
in two main directions -- force and fraud. In varying degrees these two forms of
expression are similarly present in modern warfare, in the pecuniary
occupations, and in sports and games. Both lines of aptitudes are cultivated and
strengthened by the life of sport as well as by the more serious forms of
emulative life. Strategy or cunning is an element invariably present in games,
as also in warlike pursuits and in the chase. In all of these employments
strategy

(274) tends to develop into finesse and chicanery. Chicanery, falsehood,
browbeating, hold a well-secured place in the method of procedure of any
athletic contest and in games generally. The habitual employment of an umpire,
and the minute technical regulations governing the limits and details of
permissible fraud and strategic advantage, sufficiently attest the fact that
fraudulent practices and attempts to overreach one's opponents are not
adventitious features of the game. In the nature of the case habituation to
sports should conduce to a fuller development of the aptitude for fraud; and the
prevalence in the community of that predatory temperament which inclines men to
sports connotes a prevalence of sharp practice and callous disregard of the
interests of others, individually and collectively. Resort to fraud, in any
guise and under any legitimation of law or custom, is an expression of a
narrowly self-regarding habit of mind. It is needless to dwell at any length on
the economic value of this feature of the sporting character.

In this connection it is to be noted that the most obvious characteristic of
the physiognomy affected by athletic and other sporting men is that of an
extreme astuteness. The gifts and exploits of Ulysses are scarcely second to
those of Achilles, either in their substantial furtherance of the game or in the
éclat which they give the astute sporting man among his associates. The
pantomime of astuteness is commonly the first step in that assimilation to the
professional sporting man which a youth undergoes after matriculation in any
reputable school, of the secondary or the

(275) higher education, as the case may be. And the physiognomy of
astuteness, as a decorative feature, never ceases to receive the thoughtful
attention of men whose serious interest lies in athletic games, races, or other
contests of a similar emulative nature. As a further indication of their
spiritual kinship, it may be pointed out that the members of the lower
delinquent class usually show this physiognomy of astuteness in a marked degree,
and that they very commonly show the same histrionic exaggeration of it that is
often seen in the young candidate for athletic honors. This, by the way, is the
most legible mark of what is vulgarly called "toughness" in youthful
aspirants for a bad name.

The astute man, it may be remarked, is of no economic value to the community
-- unless it be for the purpose of sharp practice in dealings with other
communities. His functioning is not a furtherance of the generic life process.
At its best, in its direct economic bearing, it is a conversion of the economic
substance of the collectivity to a growth alien to the collective life process
-- very much after the analogy of what in medicine would be called a benign
tumor, with some tendency to transgress the uncertain line that divides the
benign from the malign growths. The two barbarian traits, ferocity and
astuteness, go to make up the predaceous temper or spiritual attitude. They are
the expressions of a narrowly self-regarding habit of mind. Both are highly
serviceable for individual expediency in a life looking to invidious success.
Both also have a high aesthetic value. Both are fostered by the pecuniary
culture. But both alike are of no use for the purposes of the collective life.

Notes

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